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Final Boss are doing another episode on Feral Druids. This time Stenhaldi is back along with Pawkets. I’ve come up with a few questions which I’ve sent in, but I’m not sure if they’ll make it on the show. We’ll have to watch and see. They steam their show live at http://www.twitch.tv/FinalBossTV. The show starts at 6am Australian Time or 4pm EST (American time). If you miss the show live you can see it on the Final Boss YouTube Channel or via podcast.

Main Show

After Show

1. What can be done to address Feral’s weak AOE damage? Does the buff to Thrash help at all?

2. Does the buff to Thrash make it worth using in the single target rotation?

3. Has Feral’s bad AOE affected the specs representation in mythic content? I see a lot of hyperbolic comments of people being “forced” to play a different class or switch to boomkin or being sat entirely. Do these claims have any merit?

4. Is Savage Roar set too high at 40%? How does this affect the spec with regards to:

How punishing is it for new players and does it make the skill cap too high? Or is that the design intent of the spec? Seems counter intuitive with the Glyph of Savagery.

Scaling – We get incremental buffs each patch, could something else be done?

5. Any thoughts on reworking Druid Talents?

We have two CC tiers with little impact on game play, some options have extremely rare niche uses.

More diversity of the level 90 talents, with Dream of Cenarius being the only real option.

6. Thoughts on Claws of Shivallah? Has it been successful? Does it get much use by PVPers or new players? It’s told to be avoided in all PVE guides. Should it be reworked or removed?

7. Haste historically has been a bad stat for Ferals. Any ideas on how to address this moving forward?

My raid team as been steadily progressing through normal Blackrock Foundry and I thought it’s about time to take a look at it from a Feral Druids point of view. One of the advantages of BRF is it’s winged design, allowing for each team to clear bosses in multiple orders. In this post, bosses will be listed in the order we defeated them.

Gruul
This boss is a good single-target dps encounter, perfect for Bloodtalons. There is very little movement and no adds or AOE required. From a DPS perspective, there are only two things you need to worry about. The first is the Cave In ability. This places a void zone on the ground you need to avoid. This is only moderately annoying. It may cause your group to have to move or may block you exit if you get targeted by his next ability Shatter. If you get targeted by this ability, you need to run out of the raid and make sure you are at least 8 yards away from any player. Gruul has quite a large hit box and I’ve found it possible on several occasions to far enough away to avoid Shatter damage, but still be able to dps the boss. This is a good thing to try to increase your dps uptime. However it’s really susceptible to RNG e.g. two people running the same direction, or the tank moves the boss etc… Good introductory fight. Practice your single target rotation.

A new podcast / video cast has recently started up with a focus on Warcraft end game raiding named Final Boss. In this weeks show they are discussing Feral Druids with special guests Tinderhoof of <Last Word> and Stenhaldi of <Midwinter>. I encourage all of you to check it out, its a very in-depth and comprehensive show. Here is the link to their video show on youtube, however you can download the voice only from itunes. All of Tinderhoof’s and Stenhaldi’s contact details can be found in the youtube doobly doo.

I sent in a few questions for them to answer, but to hear their responses you will need to wait right until the end during the post show. Here are the questions I sent in. Only the first questions was answered in the main show, the others were answered in the post show which can be found here or in the comments of this post.

1. Do you think that button bloat is affecting Ferals? e.g. Shred / Mangle do the same thing, can be confusing for a new player. Innervate is useless and Soothe sees very little play.

2. Soothe – What are your thoughts on this spell? Do you think it is useful & what do you like the way enrage effects have been used this expansion. What do you think is the future of the spell and enrage effects in general?

3. Are there any talents, glyphs etc… that you would like to see become baseline for Feral? e.g. Glyphs of Savage Roar, Cat Form, Stampeding Roar (aoe spell but need to glyph for larger range… ????). May reduce the number of “mandatory” glyphs, already have limited options as a Druid because we have 4 specs.

4. What changes (if any) would you like to see with Symbiosis? Would you prefer the spell to be utility focused, throughput focused or a mix of both? How do you feel about some combos being preferred for raid throughput over personal choice e.g. Shattering Throw. Death Coil was good conceptually for a ranged option but not practical due to high energy cost, no CP generation and not effected by Berserk.

5. What design changes do you think we could see in Warlords given the removal of dot snap-shotting (speculative). Could we expect a redesign of the class, possibly moving our damage away from dots to more direct damage?

6. Ferocious Bite? Good, bad, unnecessary? What is its future?

7. Do you have a wish list for Warlords, anything you would like to see changed, expanded upon or something new?

About three weeks ago I was offered a tanking position on a ten man team on my new realm Frostmourne. After two solid nights over two weeks on Garrosh we finally downed him. It was an intense, albeit sloppy first kill. I would like to share what I found the fight really interesting and challenging about the fight from a tank perspective.

Since I have been back raiding with my guild, I have taken up a tanking role instead of a DPS role like I was last expansion. I would like to share my experiences as a Guardian from the first two encounters in Throne of Thunder.

Continuing with the “numbers aren’t the only thing that makes you a good player” theme that has been present in several of my latest posts; I am going to re-visit a previous topic and discuss how it applies to the current raiding tier. The previous post on Stampeding Roar was written before Mists of Pandaria and there have been some minor changes to how players can interact with the spell, primarily through the revised glyph system. The encounter design of the current tier has created several opportunities to use this spell to its fullest potential which I will be exploring in this post.

The old Stampeding Roar tool tip from Cataclysm. (Image from WoW Head)

The guild I am currently in is quite small, containing just the raid team and a few other friends and family. We don’t have a guild website or forums but we do have a Facebook page where we communicate. A few weeks ago a pic was uploaded a guildies User Interface (UI) and then everyone followed suit putting theirs up, everyone accept me. I have decided to devote a blog to my UI and go into detail about what addons I use, why I have set it up the way I have and the pro’s and con’s of my set up.

Why have a custom UI?
Most experienced World of Warcraft plays know that the default UI is not very efficient or optimal at displaying the information we need as players. The UI displays a lot of different information depend on the situation being used.